Thursday, May 7, 2015

opmsg trickery

Given the recent crypto discussion, mass surveillance andcyber jokes in general, I uploaded a new project to my github.It was about time.I wonder whether our gov is equally toast/bad in other fields,or if I just get pointed to it because I have some backgroundin this field and am blind to all the other failures whereI am missing the knowledge. (SIGILL//NOPORN)Update:The first review round is over and it seems like opmsgconcept found some friends. I got some recommendationswhich were incorporated in the git. Thats new:- fixing insufficient hashing of persona key to detect tampering of RSA keys during transit/import (RSA's e value was simply not part of the hash and it now is)- removing OFB cipher modes in favor of CTR and GCM modes (AES)- adding option to allow linking of personas (see README)- adding cygwin supportIt is incredibly hard to review your own code; so thanks tomyself. While I buy the OFB arguments, I am not sure if itsa benefit to add ECC support for personas. ECC is mostly basedon curves with parameters chosen by NIST. The same NIST that issuspected of putting backdoors in crypto standards(slides), even more in standards that use ECC to generaterandomness! Knowing this, why should I trust any parameters chosen by them? You can argue that suite-B, the NSA approved standards for protecting US gov infra, is unlikely to contain backdoors for themself and that this would be a tough bluffto do so just to read Putin's email. But given the additionalimplementation cost (maybe I should crowdfund it?) forlittle benefit or even "badfit" this seems not worth the effort.